I was asked about using the Lost Dutchman game for working in large group team building events a few minutes ago so I thought to share some ideas. These days, I do only a few training events and presentations a year, mostly for when I go to kickoff a new exclusive contract with a collaborating company in foreign lands or when I see a good challenge or high impact event. I love this stuff and it has been 35+ years in the business, now. It is hard to believe but we first started presenting board game version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine in 1993 — 30 years ago and it is better than ever! (article updated July, 2022)

We have a new online, virtual version for remote teambuilding, but that is generally for smaller groups of 24.
It can be run with larger groups but that is not to be explained herein.

There are few interactive, participative and engaging team building exercises that work really well with large groups. (I will note that I can deliver Square Wheels sessions for large groups, interactively and with a great deal of participation, but those sessions are just not as FUN and Memorable as the Dutchman ones…)

And I will admit that I really do like using the game with large groups, since it works really so well with large groups and I will often be able to get the most senior leaders actively involved with me in its delivery.That tends to generate their level of ownership involvement and commitment toward both the delivery as well as the required followup needed to actually implement the ideas that are suggested and the impacts that are discussed.

I guess my most favorite “trick” is to get the organization’s Most Very Senior Manager (see pictures below) to actually lead the post-game discussion of:

“What might mining as much gold as we can mean to our organization?
What things can we choose to do differently back at work?”

The responses to that from the direct reports are usually right on target and meaningful and they would not even bubble up if the participants did not think that they were at least somewhat doable and that they would obviously need the involvement and active support of that senior leader. It is the perception of roadblocks and impediments that seem to be the most common roadblocks and impediments!

Plus, I like working with the senior managers most of all, and if we are doing a  large group team building event, let’s say 150 to 200 people, I can often get the senior leadership team to actually go through and debrief the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building training event with me before we actually do the training on how to co-deliver and support the game in the venue and then afterwards.

Followup is the breakfast of team building champions!

Doing these kinds of sessions also has a certain level of challenge for me and it does leverage my time pretty nicely. (And note that I have associates running big games like this worldwide. Jimmy Jain just ran one for 200 senior managers today, in India.) Often, my simple credibility as developer of the exercise seems to lend itself to having a good deal of impact on the issues that the organization faces to improve collaboration and performance.

When you can get the senior leader of the organization (standing with hat and coffee) visibly up front, wandering around and clearly supporting the play by asking what people can do differently, that is really neat:

Demonstrating they are there to “Help Teams be Successful and Maximize ROI,” is great to reference in the debriefing as well as when he wears his cowboy hat to management meetings to talk about optimizing organizational performance results:

Since we sell our Professional Version of the game to organizations and consultants, they also find the game easy to play and useful for engaging participants in discussions of issues and opportunities for improvement. Many of our user-base runs the game with large groups and one client company (Wipro in India) ran one session with 870 people in one room at one time! The testimonials we get are routinely excellent. Two are below and another 30 are here.

You can read more about all aspects of the Lost Dutchman Game and our viewpoints on optimizing results and generating real teambuilding in the many dozens of articles here in our blog. We can deliver events, teach others to deliver the game (like a trusted organizational development person within your firm) or recommend a colleague of ours. We have a global network of users and we sell as well as rent the game for one-time, large event use.

Dutchman is really bombproof to deliver and there are tons of documents and powerpoints within the game packaging to make it easy to learn and impactful to deliver. We would actually prefer that YOU run the game yourselves, since there is more obvious support for the key messages and a higher likelihood of implementing suggestions and improvements.

You can read more about delivering the exercise to large groups in other articles on our blog. This one shares some ideas about actually delivering the exercise for large events and was written to support owners of the exercise.

My role is to help teams be successful and maximize Return on Investment! 

How can we help YOU?

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For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools.
Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Here is a 2-minute overview of our new online, virtual team building game: https://youtu.be/6sFUOTjdUVg